Research Overview
Merlin is a new network management framework that allows administrators to
express policies in a high-level, declarative language based on regular
expressions. The compiler automatically partitions those policies into
components that can be placed on a variety of devices including switches,
middleboxes, and end hosts. The compiler uses a constraint-solver to determine
the optimal placement strategy using paramaterizable heuristics. Sub-policies
may be further constrained by network tenants, facilitating management of
federated networks. Merlin provides techniques for verifying that both the
partitioned program components and the delegated sub-policies conform to the
global network policy. Overall, Merlin simplifies the task of network
administration by providing high-level abstractions for specifying network
policies and scalable infrastructure for enforcing them.
Posters & Presentations
-
Merlin: Unified Management for Diverse
Networks.
Shrutarshi
Basu,
Robert
Soulé,
Robert
Kleinberg,
Emin Gün
Sirer, and
Nate
Foster.
SOSP ’13, Nov. 2013.
